Music Security "cracked"

[rts]

BBC News article
Doom9.org thread

A bit of a bummer for Microsoft and the music industry.

[Bail]

I swear I saw something breifly on N24 about "free music" that was paid for by the ads on the site, that was supposed to be a serious rival to apple..

[rts]

I swear I saw something breifly on N24 about "free music" that was paid for by the ads on the site, that was supposed to be a serious rival to apple..

SpiralFrog which I believe is from Universal will offer free downloads, which revenue made from heavy advertisments. Songs however will not be able to be burned to CD, or work on all MP3 players, crucially Apples iPod. I suspect close ties with Creative Zen.

[Dr Lobster*]

this is of course an interesting development, but lets not forget it's been possible to circumvent drm restrictions with the analog output path for many years (and to be honest, this will probably always be impossible to prevent), although it takes ages if you've got a lot of music it's very easy.

however this little plugin will enable you to make un-drm'd versions of your current music collection:

http://www.chronotron.com/content.php?page=downloads

WAV Output plug-in for Windows Media Player ( http://www.chronotron.com/binaries/wavoutsetup.msi )

you can then output any drm wma file to a wav file. if you click the check box for disabling audio ouput, it does the whole thing much quicker - it did about 10 files in about two minutes on this pc.

[cdd]

this is of course an interesting development, but lets not forget it's been possible to circumvent drm restrictions with the analog output path for many years (and to be honest, this will probably always be impossible to prevent), although it takes ages if you've got a lot of music it's very easy.

however this little plugin will enable you to make un-drm'd versions of your current music collection:

http://www.chronotron.com/content.php?page=downloads

WAV Output plug-in for Windows Media Player ( http://www.chronotron.com/binaries/wavoutsetup.msi )

you can then output any drm wma file to a wav file. if you click the check box for disabling audio ouput, it does the whole thing much quicker - it did about 10 files in about two minutes on this pc.

Trusted Computing would put a stop to all that, as Secure I/O protection will ensure it's actually going to a "certified" SPEAKER.

[Dr Lobster*]

all this trusted platform is still futile, if i had a certified speaker and unsoldered the physical speaker itself (plain old magnet, coil, cardboard) from the internal electronics and wired it into an input i could still get a near perfect copy of the audio from it. i know i'd still need to run it through an amp (or play about with the levels in an appropriate audio editor) but the fact that this is so easy to circumvent.

personally i don't think it will ever come to that, drm is such an artificial restriction i think media files will in time turn out to be impossible to protect in this way simply because you'll never ever stop people reverse engineering things like speakers, sound card drivers etc.